Catherine Austin Fitts
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Catherine Austin Fitts is an American investment banker, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George H. W. Bush, and founder of Solari, Inc., a Tennessee-based financial advisory and investment research firm. The U.S. federal government has diverted trillions of dollars of public funds into an unaccountable black budget system, and that this covert financial apparatus — built incrementally since at least the National Security Act of 1947 — represents the infrastructure of an ongoing global corporate takeover.
Biography
Fitts holds academic credentials from the Chinese University of Hong Kong among other institutions. She served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and as a managing director at Dillon, Read & Co. before founding Solari, Inc. She lives in Hickory Valley, Tennessee.
Litigation with the U.S. government
After leaving HUD, Fitts was hired by government officials to clean up fraud in HUD programs; the fraud was successfully cleaned up, only for Fitts to then become the target of a government-sponsored whistleblower action and a protracted eleven-year legal campaign. Steven Greer independently corroborated this account, stating that Fitts discovered money "being frankly embezzled and misappropriated out of HUD into illegal black projects" and that "when she blew the whistle on it, she was threatened and she was fired." The litigation process eventually involved poisoning attempts and escalating pressure after she refused to settle and insisted on going to court. Courts in the case were required to coordinate at the highest levels because the government was taking contradictory legal positions in different courts simultaneously — visible only through a systematic timeline analysis.
The missing money research
Partnership with Mark Skidmore
Fitts collaborated with Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore to document what they characterize as systemic undocumented federal adjustments — money drawn from agency budgets and classified through the black-budget authority of the National Security Act of 1947. Skidmore, a tenured professor, began the analysis expecting ordinary accounting irregularities and was initially bewildered by the scale of what the government documents showed. Both the Inspector General offices of the Department of Defense and HUD subsequently took their relevant documents offline simultaneously. Fitts had anticipated this and preserved backups through indirect linking so that the research record remained intact.
Their joint research, published through Skidmore's academic channels and Fitts's Solari Report, identified approximately $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments in the Pentagon and HUD between 1998 and 2015 — a figure Fitts subsequently updated to $25 trillion, representing approximately $65,000 per American. The inspector general's final report on the DoD fiscal year 2015 figures — which showed $6.5 trillion in undocumented adjustments in a single year — was subsequently published in redacted form.
The AOC suppression hypothesis
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's public promotion of the missing money issue in Congress was a managed operation designed to suppress it: by associating the claim with a left-wing progressive figure, it was rendered politically toxic to the conservative commentators who would otherwise have amplified it — effectively neutralizing the issue across the political spectrum.
Missing money chronology
The "Missing Money Chronology" is a detailed timeline of key financial and political events constituting the architecture of the covert economy, beginning with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Key entries include:
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1934: The Gold Reserve Act created the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which Fitts calls "the mother of all slush funds" — a pool legally exempt from normal congressional oversight.
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1947: The National Security Act of 1947 and the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act together created the black budget mechanism, allowing the executive branch to draw from other agencies' appropriations without disclosure. The New York Federal Reserve Bank — the flagship of the Federal Reserve system and depository for the U.S. government — operates the Exchange Stabilization Fund and is, in Fitts's analysis, the central node of the covert financial apparatus.
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1971: The Nixon shock — the termination of dollar-gold convertibility — replaced the gold constraint with an oil-denominated currency standard via the petrodollar arrangement with Saudi Arabia, enabling an effectively unlimited capacity to issue bonds and draw on federal credit.
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1981: An executive order facilitated a major increase in fraud activity, leading to Iran-Contra drug money operations and the expansion of the black economy through the 1980s.
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1990s: The Clinton administration's abandonment of what Fitts calls the "green button" approach — genuine reinvestment in inner cities and community economic development — in favor of further concentration of financial power, including passage of laws enabling private prison expansion.
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1995: The Oklahoma City bombing is situated within coordinated activity between Clinton and Bush networks operating in FEMA Region Six (covering Arkansas and Texas), areas central to earlier drug money operations.
The Forrestal murder hypothesis
James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, was murdered rather than dying by suicide at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949 — a thesis linked to a study by researcher Dave Martin. Forrestal's killing was a partnership between Rockefeller interests, the Nazi financial underground, and organized crime — the same coalition identified as the core of the postwar covert financial system. Forrestal's death followed the enactment of the National Security Act, identified as the key legislative moment that empowered this covert structure — and Forrestal's opposition to elements of this arrangement made him a target.
The Eisenhower error and its aftermath
Dwight D. Eisenhower made a pivotal mistake by authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to control security — and therefore financing — for Area 51, allowing the CIA to "go dark" and establish a self-funding covert apparatus beyond executive oversight. Eisenhower had sufficient personal military authority to attempt corrective action without being assassinated — but John F. Kennedy lacked this protection, and Kennedy was killed because he intended to conduct an audit of the intelligence agencies, which would have exposed where the money diverted in the mid-1950s had gone. The same analysis extends to Michael Flynn: his real offence was a plan to audit the intelligence agencies upon becoming National Security Advisor, which would have uncovered how the $6.5 trillion moved from the Pentagon in fiscal year 2015 had been deployed — including the financing of terrorist networks.
The Great Reset framework
Contemporary events — including the COVID-19 lockdowns, accelerated consolidation of financial wealth, and mRNA injection programs — are components of "the Great Reset": a coordinated effort by a neoliberal elite to implement a form of corporate fascism globally. The war on terror has been succeeded by a health emergency paradigm as the primary mechanism of social control and economic extraction, noting that viruses have historically been used to concentrate wealth and justify exceptional government powers. The term "vaccine" does not apply to COVID-19 injections — they are "toxins" on the grounds that they do not meet the legal definition of medicine.
The Solari Report
Solari, Inc. operates the Solari Report, a subscription-based financial intelligence and commentary service. The Solari Report functions as an "intelligence network" rather than a media outlet — oriented toward helping subscribers understand the actual structure of financial power and make independent decisions accordingly. The annual Solari wrap-up report — published in hard copy — compiles detailed timelines of financial, political, and covert activity from the preceding year. Her methodology centers on the use of timelines to make visible the patterns of fraud and coordination that are obscured when events are analyzed in isolation: "the way the control systems, particularly the money and financial systems, are organized — they're organized to keep everybody in their silos."
Tucker Carlson Show interview — underground bases and the near-extinction event
In an April 2025 interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, Fitts outlined her theory of where the $21 trillion in undocumented federal adjustments has been directed: the construction of an extensive underground base, city, and transportation infrastructure across the United States and globally. She described a 2021–2023 project in which she and a senior Solari subscriber systematically estimated the number of underground bases in and around the United States — including sub-ocean facilities — and arrived at a figure of approximately 170. Her core hypothesis is that these facilities serve two functions simultaneously: providing a secure platform for secret space program activities that must be kept off the surface, and providing refuge infrastructure in the event of what she terms a "near-extinction event." She referenced Richard Dolan's work on underground bases (including a Solari interview with Dolan on the subject) as the primary published research foundation for this analysis.
Fitts also addressed the role of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the central bank of central banks — as the institutional vehicle through which the $21 trillion could be extracted from the U.S. government and held secretly. She identified three key structural features of the BIS that make this possible: sovereign immunity, the ability to hold money on its balance sheet secretly, and the ability to move money anywhere in the world without disclosure. She applied this mechanism to explain why the money disappeared — describing the New York Federal Reserve member banks as the depository through which Treasury funds were drawn and then transferred to BIS accounts: "If I want to steal $21 trillion from the U.S. government and park it on the balance sheet of the BIS, it can move it anywhere in the world and it can keep it on its balance sheet secretly."
On the question of what the capital was ultimately mobilized for, Globalization itself — the offshoring of Western industrial production from the 1990s onward — was orchestrated in part to generate the centralized capital needed to finance a multi-planetary civilization: "I think they wanted to create the capacity and centralize the capital they needed to go into space." The concentration of wealth into a small number of technology billionaires (Musk, Bezos) who then reinvested into space infrastructure was the predictable downstream expression of this strategy. The near-extinction event hypothesis provides the motivation: those at the top of the financial system, aware of cyclical catastrophic events in Earth's history, built underground and space infrastructure as an exit strategy — accumulating capital through the decimation of the middle class and investing it in survival infrastructure invisible to the public.
The interview also covered the conversion of the financial system into a digital control grid, which Fitts described as a mechanism for real-time individual surveillance and rule enforcement at the transaction level — effectively ending currency as a medium of exchange and replacing it with a programmable permission system. She cited a 2020 statement by the General Manager of the BIS on an IMF panel, in which he stated that central bank digital currency would give central banks "the technology to enforce" rules on individual transactions anywhere in the world.
Danny Jones Podcast interview — $21 trillion and the breakaway civilization
Fitts appeared on the Danny Jones Podcast (episode #305), discussing her research on undocumented federal adjustments in depth with host Danny Jones. The interview, titled "$21 Trillion Black Budget is Funding a Rogue Breakaway Civilization," expanded on the thesis she developed with economist Mark Skidmore that approximately $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments had flowed through the Pentagon and HUD between 1998 and 2015, and on her broader argument that these funds have been directed into a covert infrastructure constituting a functionally independent breakaway civilization — a hypothesis that aligns with the analysis independently developed by Richard Dolan.